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... How do you guys hollow out the saya? I was going to dremel it, but my dremel is as old as I am and it just seems like a bad idea in general. I was thinking about chiseling, but I have no chisels or chiseling experience... File that **** and hand sand I suppose?

I saw pictures of a Japanese shop making sayas. They would take a block and saw it into three pieces. The two outer pieces being the same thickness and the middle piece slightly thicker than the blade. They then traced the blade on the middle piece and used something like a coping saw to cut out the shape. They then glued that outer perimeter of the middle piece between the two outer halves.

Traditional way of making a saya is to re-saw a block into two pieces and carve a cavity into one. Then glue them together, shape and medium grit sand them. Shaping is very basic - rounding spine edge and giving a slight bevel to the edge side and smooth the wood.

I like to shape sayas the way a knife is shaped - bevels, taper, rounded spine and edge. All of these can be done with hand tools (rasps) or a belt sander. All final rounding and finishing I do by hand. If done properly,
you won't see a glue line and the whole piece will look like a single bock. People ask me all the time how I carved the cavity without splitting the wood.

Some makers, including Carter and Tsil, use inserts, as Dan described in his post above. It works, but a fit is not as precise as in a carved cavity - a cross-section of cavity is similar to that of a knife, and you will end up with two extra glue lines, so I never considered it. However, this is not how Japanese do it. At least I have not seen a single Japanese saya done in this way. For Japanese this method would be too labor-intensive.

M

"All beauty that has no foundation in use, soon grows distasteful and needs continuous replacement with something new." The Shakers' saying.

Yeah, I was afraid someone would ask that. I'm not sure how I found it. I'll go back through my Google search history and see if I can find it. It had a young Japanese woman doing the work. I think she was working inside a blacksmith's shop. Seems like it was a family thing, father, son making knives and maybe a daughter making sayas.

Tom, why would you need such a big belt sander? 6x48 is perfectly adequate for all I do. That big sander if probably less flat on sanding surface than mine. I have 6x48" Shopsmith. Fantastic sander. I also have 11" Shopsmith bandsaw. Fantastic too.

M

"All beauty that has no foundation in use, soon grows distasteful and needs continuous replacement with something new." The Shakers' saying.